Not Every Movie Released in January is Bad – Here’s 10 Films That Prove It

The movie calendar has seasons just like the regular one: The big movies come out in the summer, the awards contenders arrive in the fall, and, supposedly, everything released in January stinks. People even call it “Dumpuary,” just because that is where Hollywood dumps the movies that are guaranteed to flop. At the start of each year, audiences are still catching up with the previous year’s Oscar contenders, which are filtering down from the big cities to the art houses and multiplexes. Still focused on those films, studios don’t have the bandwidth for new stuff, which is why the new stuff that does arrive in the first weeks of each year is often low risk, low rent, and lowbrow.

But, if you know where to look, you can find good movies in January. (No, not just on Netflix. C’mon, don’t be fresh.) Sometimes a January release date is not the sentence of execution it appears to be. Although Dumpuary has been a thing in the movie industry for decades, Hollywood has also released a lot of good movies in January — including at least a couple of the greatest films ever made. Here are 10 notable examples from the last 50 years. (And, to be clear, these aren’t the only good January movies. There’s quite a few more.)